The 1968 Beatles song John Lennon wrote at his lowest low: “Trying to reach God and feeling suicidal”

faroutmagazine.co.uk

The 1968 Beatles song John Lennon wrote at his lowest low: “Trying to reach God and feeling suicidal”

Callum MacHattie

Far Out Magazine

Fri 28 August 2026

Credit: Far Out / ABKO Films

History likes to say that John Lennon and Paul McCartney led The Beatles into their most uncomfortable creative territories, but really, it was George Harrison, who quietly turned the route of the creative navigation with the most intensity.

Of course, over the period of their seven-year reign, it was Lennon and McCartney who widened the goalposts the furthest, writing songs and innovating studio techniques that would completely transform the band and all the music that would be created thereafter. But George Harrison made the most radically singular move by heading East and looking for a new source of spirituality to help inspire creativity. 

Harrison’s trip to India came at the perfect time for the Beatle, who was becoming somewhat disillusioned with his role in the band and as a figure of global stardom, aching to discover more of his own creativity that was otherwise being stifled by his fame, so after exposing himself to Eastern philosophies and their imperious gurus to shift into a mindset that felt more aligned with the musical stewardship he was receiving under Ravi Shankar, Harrison was ready to redefine his involvement in the band. 

With his wife Pattie Boyd, he joined the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, founded in 1958 by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to promote transcendental meditation globally, and subsequently felt motivated to share his teachings with his band. Rather than use his enlightenment to run from The Beatles and start a new, he wanted to share and so enlisted his fellow Beatles to attend the Maharishi’s lecture in August 1967 at The Hilton on Park Lane in London.

For a while, the seed of spiritualism began to grow within the band, and they wholeheartedly embraced the tutelage of Maharishi, via the quiet leadership of their fellow Beatle, and much of that experimentation can be heard on their famous ‘68 album, The White Album, namely on the track ‘Yer Blues’, which saw Lennon take what he had learned and mix it with his pre-disposed gloomy outlook. 

“‘Yer Blues’ was written in India, too. Up there, trying to reach God and feeling suicidal,” he explained.

The latter theme of the song proved how he was, in fact, slowly becoming disillusioned with the entire school of thought, questioning how connected it actually made him feel with the world and people around him. 

“The funny thing about the [Maharishi’s] camp,” he recalled in The Beatles Anthology, “was that although it was very beautiful and I was meditating about eight hours a day, I was writing the most miserable songs on Earth”. ‘Yer Blues’ was one of them, and when he wrote the line, “I’m so lonely I want to die”, he was clear: “I’m not kidding. That’s how I felt”.

Shortly after, accusations of sexual misconduct by the Maharishi towards a female follower of his began to circulate, and suddenly this retreat of enlightenment became a fever dream of confusion, with the members of the band eventually coming to question whether or not his teachings had any place in the ranks of the world’s most influential band.